Windows Windows 10 Installation Media wiped drive - Need help with recovery

I was attempting to reinstall Windows 10 for a relative and long story short the partition I created for the bootable disk did not work and instead the installation media wiped the entire drive. Unfortunately my relative had not backed up much of the drive and to make matters worse it was a second hand drive that had not been properly wiped between uses. This means that using recovery software such as EaseUS, Puran or Recuva brings up thousands of files (192,000 in EaseUS) and presented in generic unhelpful folders (e.g, JPG) with their files interspersed with no file names.

So does anyone know of a way to recover an entire partition to its previous state, including folders and file names. Sort of like an undo button. The drive has not been used since as to protect the data. My relative does not have a previous save of shadow copy of the drive to restore from.

 

I'm not an expert, but I don't think it is going to happen, even with professional services as I assume you have written over a chunk of the data with the OS install.
If you had just done a quick format you could try to restore the file tree. Without the file tree, it is a bunch of random files.

 

I've done the same on my own PC years ago, selected to install Windows on the drive I used for storage, I spent about a month recovering and reviewing files, think I got back about 60% of stuff.

This reason alone I only do installs if people backup their own stuff, I still backup what I find just in case but this at least gives me some reason to take no responsibility.

It's either a timely job for you or expensive job for someone but I highly doubt you'll get file names back.

Good luck